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Are Your Students Scared to Death of Mathematics?

Description:

This article from the JAE special math issue deals with how to help students overcome their fear of math, in particular problem solving. Suggestions for how to teach problem solving include teachers preparing themselves to teach, helping students develop a positive attitude toward problem solving, encouraging students to first solve simple one-step problems, teaching students estimation, reassuring students that there is more than one correct strategy for solving a problem, not always assigning routine math activities, developing and implementing problem-solving activities, using problems from daily life, providing many problems for practice, allowing students to use calculators, using a bulletin board for classroom activities, and collecting problems at different levels of difficulty.